It is remarkable how during the last 25 years (approximately), Microsoft has been improving their ability to deliver first (or be among the first), followed by messing up the whole process so that late comers end up taking the crown jewels.
PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, tablets with detachable keyboards, managed OS userspace, HoloLens, the XBox mess, and now AI.
There certainly other examples that I failed to address.
This is what happens when divisions fight among themselves for OKRs and whatever other goals.
And their philosophy of mediocre = good enough. (Not everything ofc, MS is a continent. .net core, language design etc is top-notch.)
Which certainly has to do with it being initially developed at Microsoft Research Cambridge, and not plain Microsoft.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40472977
https://web.archive.org/web/20190111203733/https://blogs.msd...
I would argue that the success has more to do with DevDiv being the strongest technical organization at MS than its provenance.
I STILL REMEMBER WHEN SOME MARKETING IDIOT DECIDED THAT VISUAL STUDIO NEEDED TO SHOUT AT YOU. IT TOOK THREE MAJOR VERISONS BEFORE VISUAL STUDIO STOPPED LOOKING LIKE THIS COMMENT. OF COURSE THERE WASN'T A SETTING TO MAKE IT NORMAL AGAIN.
Damn, I got frustrated just by reading this comment :D
Until they messed up the whole UWP / WinRT developer experience in Visual Studio.
Also VS 2026 was released with a hard milestone, thus while there is a new settings experience, many options show a dialog from VS 2022, because the new UI is still not implemented for the new experience.
Note that most organisations have to pay for Visual Studio licenses, and get rewarded with such quality.
Slop has also arrived into DevDiv.
I think after the failure of Metro, I think Microsoft gave up on native apps entirely and now the story is web or Electron.
It appears the problem is more deep than that.
From what I could infer from some community talks, podcasts and so, I would assert that nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.
Thus Windows team gets lots of folks that never coded anything for Windows, and management instead of having proper trainings in place, just goes with Webview2 and Electron all over the place.
I might be wrong, this is more my perception than anything else.
I would say the web took over as the primary application platform and Unix-likes provided convenient low cost license-free foundations to build them on.
No excuse for not having trainings in place for Windows native development, for those new hires.
You don't see Apple and Google doing the same Webviews all over the place on their OSes, with exception of ChromeOS, which appears to be on the death row to be replaced with Android anyway.
In fact, at WWDC 2025 Apple executives even spoke publicly on the matter against that approach.
> nowadays they have the problem new hires have been educated in UNIX like OSes and Web.
So, in other words, the kids grow up learning and using Linux, right?
More like macOS and Chromebooks, developing mobile apps and Web.
Developers, at least. And Macs.
Ah, thanks. That must be the link with Simon Peyton Jones as well. Seems to be another case of a marketing machine running away with foundational research coming from Europe.*
* no hard feelings
But still, Microsoft is the most diversified of the big players - they have Windows, Office, Enterprise, Xbox, Azure, Surface - they can survive a mess like their current copilot mess and still generally thrive
It has more to do with Microsoft's size and long history. If you are big and have been doing the same thing for many years, naturally you'll want to expand, some of which do succeed.
Google and Facebook have failed to do this, so why is that?
Failed to do what?
I'm sure you can find good analysis of why specific products failed.
And both Google/Alphabet and Facebook/Meta have a bunch of side projects that are reasonably successful.
They have failed to diversify, is what I meant, despite being around for approx 2 decades
Lets look at diversification of revenue:
meta $164b revenue in 2024: 98% advertising
google $350b revenue in 2024: 76% advertising, 12% google cloud, 12% other
apple $391b revenue in 2024: 66% hardware (iphone, ipad, mac), 25% services (app store etc), 9% other
amazon $638b revenue in 2024: 64% amazon store+associated services, 17% AWS, 9% ads, 11% other
microsoft $245b revenue in 2024: 40% azure/server products, 22% office, 10% windows, 9% gaming, 7% linkedin, 5% search+ads, 8% other
I'm not particularly a microsoft fan, just making this point because I think MS is poorly understood by the HN crowd
Only because they have enough money in the bank.
Thrive, or just muddle through?